New pantomime ‘Sleeping with Beauty (One Little Prick)’ turns classic fairy tale ‘Sleeping Beauty’ upside down
Get ready to laugh till your sides hurt with the funniest, filthiest, and most wickedly fabulous pantomime around!
Sleeping with Beauty (One Little Prick) is here to turn the classic fairy tale upside down in a cheeky version that’s sure to leave theatre-goers blushing and begging for more.
Follow the misadventures of Princess Rose and her friends as they engage in a racy competition to bed the prince, while trying to outwit the devilishly seductive Maleficent.
Appearing in the production is Mike Newman, son of the late Irish comedian also called Mike Newman - meaning that this Mike Newman is technically ‘Mike Newman Jr’.
“Effectively, yes,” says Mike, “I think I’m probably a bit too old for the ‘Jr’ these days…”
On the subject of Sleeping with Beauty (One Little Prick), Mike says: “I play Queen Gertie. It’s an adult panto and it’s over-18s only.
“Anybody with a sensitive nature would be advised to think long and hard.”
Mike, who lives in Bedfordshire and travels into London by train, reveals that the piece is completely new.
“We only got the script finished about five days ago, and we have our first read-through tomorrow morning in London,” he says (our interview took place in early November).
“We will sit around and we’ll go through it and we’ll add our bits and make changes. Then we’ll go away and have another week to look at it and see what came out of the read-through - and then we’ll go into rehearsals. And we’ll open in London on 23 November.”
A seasoned performer, Mike says this will be his 21st Christmas pantomime - “but my first adult pantomime, and the second time I have ever played Dame”.
“For the last 20 years, with the exception of one, I’ve always played the comic,” he observes, “so Buttons in Cinderella, Muddles in Snow White, Wishy Washy in Aladdin, or Cuthbert the Court Jester when I’ve done Sleeping Beauty…
“I played Dame once, and that was back in 1997 in the Isle of Man, and that was for a production called Robin Hood and the Babes in the Wood - something that’s not actually done anymore.
“That was the first time I played Dame, and now here I am, considerably older, and that was one of the appeals - maybe I’m of an age now where putting a dress on is probably my option…”
Mike says that adult panto is “very much an emerging, popular brand of theatre”. He adds: “It’s proving quite
popular on the circuit, and there’s a lot of these kind of shows popping up.”
His good friend, Matt Brinkler, is the show’s producer. “He and I already produce other shows together - we’ve
got a production called Dinosaur Adventure Live,” explains Mike, who performed in a panto with his father, in Bognor Regis in 1995.
“It was absolutely wonderful that I actually got a chance to be on stage with him,” he says.
“So when he [Matt Brinkler] approached me about being Dame, it seemed like ‘OK, let’s help a mate out!’ Or he could be helping me out, I suppose, whichever way you look at it!”
Mike began his career in showbusiness as a Butlin’s Redcoat in 1992, where he met the comedian Bernard Manning (“My father had always had wonderful things to say about him, as a lovely human being of a man”).
He concludes: “I think in many ways, what we’re going to deliver is what panto used to have - that innuendo comedy that would go above the kids’ heads that the parents would snigger at.
“Only now, because it’s purely an adult audience, we can eff and blind, as it were. But the show will stick very much to the tradition of pantomime.”
Sleeping with Beauty (One Little Prick) comes to Haverhill Arts Centre on Friday, 3 January. Tickets, priced £29, are available from haverhillartscentre.co.uk.
